Search LBO-Talk Archives

1351 [lbo-talk] Anti-suburban snobs -- rank: 1000

Doug: 'It's one of the sleaziest, most dishonest books I've ever seen.' Am I to take it that you have a better statistic for the price of oil, relative to wages? Or is this, like John's merely an ad hominem attack? John: 'If it were costless for me to move to someplace where public transportation was first rate maybe I would not be forced to have a car but that is not the current reality.' Poor you! Forced to live in the most affluent society in the world. Forced to consume more resources than a ...

Document Size:	5891
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sat Sep 25 00:57:26 PDT 2004

1352 [lbo-talk] anti-suburban snobs -- rank: 1000

Doug writes: 'But if the price of transportation isn't adequately reflecting the costs of environmental damage, their choices are based on false information.' But then, as I posted just now, nearly three quarters of UK fuel prices are tax. The explicit point of the tax is to factor in the environmental costs. The net effect is nil for the environment (or negative on your estimate), since no car journeys appear to be foregone because of the cost. For the chancellor, the effect is wholly positive ...

Document Size:	7187
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri Sep 24 14:20:14 PDT 2004

1353 [lbo-talk] anti-suburban snobs -- rank: 1000

Wojtek: "James, capitalism delivers land gasoline and all what people WANT much better than socialism, so I do not understand why are you calling yourself a socialist?" Well, no, capitalism has been very tardy in spreading wealth to the people, and the living standards we are talking about are still restricted largely to North America, Western Europe and Japan. I appreciate that the inefficient and authoritarian regimes in Eastern Europe laid claim to being socialist, but I don't see a ...

Document Size:	8210
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri Sep 24 12:36:44 PDT 2004

1354 [lbo-talk] anti-Suburban snobs, was petro-thusians -- rank: 1000

Quoth Dwayne: "Now James, if I'm reading you correctly, you see the sprawling burbs as an advance over the creaky antiquities of the city, a tommorowland where dreams come true." No, Dwayne, you don't get it. It does not matter what you or I think is the best place for people to live. It matters what they think is the best place to live. You have a quaintly old-fashioned distaste for getting into a car. That's ok - let someone else drive the goods to you, then. Nobody says that you hav ...

Document Size:	6574
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri Sep 24 07:45:44 PDT 2004

1355 [lbo-talk] anti-suburban snobs, was Petro-thusians... -- rank: 1000

How superior we all are to those loathsome suburbanites! They cower in their picket-fence redoubts, festering with race prejudice. We are at ease in the inner city, they dread being 'mugged'. They consume vast resources with their SUVs and one-car commuting. We step nimbly from urban pad to office, or cycle. They are mired in a myth of frontiersman independence. We celebrate New Deal cities, along with Jane Jacobs. But, honestly, this is just so much anti-working class snobbery: urbane mandarins ...

Document Size:	7539
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri Sep 24 02:09:54 PDT 2004

1356 [lbo-talk] Europe not that different from America, was petro-thusians etc. -- rank: 1000

Some posters seeking to illustrate the supposed wickedness of the yankee consumer are tempted to imagine exemplary behaviour on the part of Europeans. But this is not so. So for example Jon writes > The trouble is that, unlike Europeans, apparently, Americans have a > very deep-seated urge to flee from areas of large population > concentration to low-concentration ones. Perhaps this is a hold-over of > the old pioneer longing to "light out for the territory." And Wojtek &qu ...

Document Size:	6745
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Sep 23 14:28:28 PDT 2004

1357 [lbo-talk] Petro-thusiasts in China -- rank: 1000

Do we detect a note of sarcasm in John Thornton's comment 'better get cracking on installing A/C units and PC's in more homes in China. We can call it the "Leave No PC Behind" campaign.'? Well, so be it. After all, China is a way off 100% home computerisation yet. But isn't it odd that we are talking about the barriers to growth in China, when for the last twenty years its growth has been the most dynamic in the world? Maybe all of this certainty that China cannot match America's stand ...

Document Size:	5276
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Wed Sep 22 17:22:03 PDT 2004

1358 [lbo-talk] Nazi science, was the petro-thusians have their moment -- rank: 1000

I do not agree with John Thornton when he writes: "Depends on the motivation for the research. You trust Nazi work on smoking because it is unrelated to Nazi beliefs. Do you trust Nazi research on eugenics? Of course not. Motive makes a difference, pretending otherwise is sticking your head in the sand." As I recall the recent research on the matter, Nazi research on smoking was done for the worst of motives. The Nazis preoccupation with pollution was closely related to their pursuit o ...

Document Size:	6396
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Wed Sep 22 12:28:19 PDT 2004

1359 [lbo-talk] Petro-thusians -- rank: 1000

Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org: "How will people fly when oil runs out?" Jane Jacobs 'all my life I have been hearing that the oil was going to run out. It never happens.' Metropolis Magazine, March 2001 Sheikh Yamani: The stone age did not end because we ran out of stones

Document Size:	4841
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Wed Sep 22 11:23:53 PDT 2004

1360 [lbo-talk] Blair Rumour, Global Warming -- rank: 1000

The WEEK ending 19 September 2004 MARTYR TO OFFICE Internet rumours that British Prime Minister Tony Blair's 16 year-old daughter Kathryn had attempted suicide in the spring add to the image of the office as a martyrdom. Blair's wife Cherie revived this picture of suffering with her book about Prime Minister's wives called 'inside the goldfish bowl', co-written with Cate Haste, the wife of novelist and TV presenter Melvin Bragg. It was Bragg who lent his insider's authority to speculation about ...

Document Size:	8985
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Tue Sep 21 09:49:49 PDT 2004

1361 [lbo-talk] CBS Poll bad news for Kerry -- rank: 1000

Wojtek wrote: 'The logic of US elections is quite simple: the liberals and progressives cannot carry any national election because there are far too few of them. If the Democrats want to win, they must attract a sufficient share of an essentially conservative population.' I distrust an argument whose premise is that the people are too stupid to make the right choice. First off, we don't know what the result will be. The view that the country will vote Bush is fatalistic. Secondly, Kerry, not th ...

Document Size:	6261
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Sep 9 15:43:06 PDT 2004

1362 [lbo-talk] Zombie anti-imperialists... -- rank: 1000

many thanks to Doug, Travis and Patrick for their responses to my piece. On permanent crises, James O'Connor might think that capitalism has been in crisis since the thirteenth century (I am not sure it even existed then), but that old fool Karl Marx stubbornly stuck to his belief that "Permanent crises do not exist." (Theories of Surplus Value, Vol II, p 497, fn) On the metaphor, it's Ulrich Beck's not mine. He meant that people are often prisoners of ideas handed down from the past, ...

Document Size:	5751
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Sep 9 02:24:37 PDT 2004

1363 [lbo-talk] Zombie anti-imperialists against the Empire -- rank: 1000

Doug: 'As Antonio Callari said years ago at a meeting of the International Working Group on Value Theory, they use it as a substitute for politics. No one on the room ever responded to Callari's critique. Instead, they obsessed over yet another iteration of VT by Ted McGlone.' There's a good essay by Lucio Colletti on crisis theory (somewhere in the Telos back catalogue) where he argues that there are two sides to Marx which are not entirely compatible. The first is the *critique* of Smith and R ...

Document Size:	7148
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Wed Sep 8 13:38:20 PDT 2004

1364 [lbo-talk] Zombie anti-imperialists vs the Empire -- rank: 1000

Reply to Patrick Bond Patrick Bond's comments on my article 'Zombie anti-imperialists take on the Empire' http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CA6BA.htm seem more picky than thoughtful. Most damningly, Patrick fails to understand that there can be no epoch of transition without a subject of transition. Without a revolutionary challenge to capitalism, all of its difficulties are only relative, and can be overcome. Patrick tries to pooh-pooh the real expansion of capitalism in the last ten ...

Document Size:	20472
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Wed Sep 8 03:13:48 PDT 2004

1365 [lbo-talk] Chechen/N Ireland comparison, was Hamas vs. Al-Qaida -- rank: 1000

Chris Doss "When did the IRA kidnap and enslave thousands of Englishmen? When did the IRA send thousands of gunmen in order to take over Scotland? When did the IRA establish the death penalty for adultery? Where were all these IRA squads that were made up, not of Irishmen, but of Saudis, Egyptians and Moroccans?" Well, they did go in for a bit of kidnap (enslavement being largely beyond their means - or ambitions, no doubt), and they did send armed Irishmen to England (and even Scotlan ...

Document Size:	5904
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Tue Sep 7 07:51:28 PDT 2004